Our civilization is locked in the grip of an ideology - CORPORATISM.
An ideology that denies and undermines the legitimacy of individuals as the citizen in a democracy.
The particular imbalance of this ideology leads to a
worship of self-interest and a denial of the public good.
The practical effects on the individual are passivity and conformism in the areas that matter, and non-conformism in the areas that don't.
John Ralston Saul

28 January, 2007

2 great articles - ALTRUIST & Future of USA

MUST HEAR AUDIO -- download the Indymedia Radio interviews with these two authors:

PROPOSITION I: NEITHER EGOISM NOR ALTRUISM IS A NATURAL URGE; THEY IN FACT ARISE IN RELATION TO EACH OTHER AND NEITHER WOULD BE CONCEIVABLE WITHOUT THE MARKET

First of all, I should make clear that I do not believe that either egoism or altruism is somehow inherent in human nature. Human motives are rarely that simple. Rather, egoism and altruism are ideas we have about human nature. Historically, one has tended to arise in response to the other. In the ancient world, for example, it is generally in the rimes and places that one sees the emergence of money and markets that one also sees the rise of world religions–Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. If one sets aside a space and says, “Here you shall think only about acquiring material things for yourself,” then it is hardly surprising that before long someone else will set aside a countervailing space and declare, in effect: “Yes, but here we must contemplate the fact that the self, and material things, are ultimately unimportant.” It was these latter institutions, of course, that first developed our modern notions of charity.

On the alienated right to do good

You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do welt. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.

–Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.)

Kerry owes an apology to the many thousands of Americans serving in Iraq, who answered their country’s call because they are patriots and not because of any deficiencies in their education.

–Sen, John McCain (R., Ariz.)

In the lead-up to the midterm elections, the Republicans’ single fleeting ray of hope was a botched joke by Senator John Kerry. The joke was obviously aimed at George W. Bush, but they took it to suggest that Kerry thought only those who flunked out of school end up in the military. It was all very disingenuous, Most knew perfectly well that Kerry’s real point was to suggest that the president wasn’t very bright. But the right smelled blood. The problem with “aristo-slackers” like Kerry, wrote one blogger on the website of National Review, is that they assume “the troops are in Iraq not because they are deeply committed to the mission (they need to deny that) but rather because of a system that takes advantage of their lack of social and economic opportunities…. We should clobber them with that ruthlessly until the day of the election–just like we did in ‘04–because it is the most basic reason they deserve to lose.”

In the end, it didn’t make a lot of difference, because most Americans decided they were not deeply committed to the mission either–insofar as they were even sure what the mission was. But it seems to me the question we should really be asking is: why did it take a military catastrophe (not to mention a strategy of trying to avoid any association with the sort of north-eastern elites Kerry typifies for so many Americans) to allow the Democrats to finally emerge from the political wilderness? Or, in other words: why has this Republican line proved so effective?

It strikes me that to get at the answer, one has to probe far more deeply into the nature of American society than most commentators are willing to go. We’re used to reducing all such issues to an either/or: patriotism versus opportunity, “values” versus bread-and-butter issues like jobs and education. But I would argue that to frame things this way plays into the hands of the right. Certainly, many people do join the army because they are deprived of opportunities. But the real question to be asking is: opportunities to do what?

Let me offer an anthropological perspective on the question. It first came home to me a year or two ago when I was attending a lecture by Catherine Lutz, a fellow anthropologist from Brown University who has been studying U.S. military bases overseas. Many of these bases organize outreach programs, in which soldiers venture out to repair schoolrooms or to perform free dental checkups for the locals. These programs were created to improve local relations, but they were apparently at least as effective in their psychological impact on the soldiers, many of whom would wax euphoric when describing them: e.g., “This is why I joined the army,” “This is what military service is really all about–not just defending your country, but helping people.” The military’s own statistics point in the same direction: although the surveys do not list “helping people” among the motives for enlistment, the most high-minded option available–”to do something to be proud of”–is the favorite.

Is it possible that America is actually a nation of frustrated altruists? Certainly this is not the way that we normally think about ourselves. (Our normal habits of thought, actually, tend toward a rough and ready cynicism. The world is a giant marketplace; everyone is in it for a buck; if you want to understand why something happened, first ask who stands to gain by it. The same attitudes expressed in the back rooms of bars are echoed in the highest reaches of social science. America’s great contribution to the world in the latter respect has been the development of “rational choice” theories, which proceed from the assumption that all human behavior can be understood as a matter of economic calculation, of rational actors trying to get as much as possible out of any given situation with the least cost to themselves. As a result, in most fields, the very existence of altruistic behavior is considered a kind of puzzle, and everyone from economists to evolutionary biologists has become famous through attempts to “solve” it–that is, to explain the mystery of why bees sacrifice themselves for hives or human beings hold open doors and give correct street directions to total strangers. At the same time, the case of the military bases suggests the possibility that in fact Americans, particularly the less “affluent ones, are haunted by frustrated desires to do good in the world.

It would not be difficult to assemble evidence that this is the case. Studies of charitable giving, for example, have shown the poor to be the most generous: the lower one’s income, the higher the proportion of it that one is likely to give away to strangers. The same pattern holds true, incidentally, when comparing the middle classes and the rich: one study of tax returns in 2003 concluded that if the most affluent families had given away as much of their assets as even the average middle-class family, overall charitable donations that year would have increased by $25 billion. (All this despite the fact that the wealthy have far more time and opportunity.) Moreover, charity represents only a tiny part of the picture. If one were to break down what typical American wage earners do with their disposable income, one would find that they give much of it away, either through spending in one way or another on their children or through sharing with others: presents, trips, parties, the six-pack of beer for the local softball game. One might object that such sharing is more a reflection of the real nature of pleasure than anything else (who would want to eat a delicious meal at an expensive restaurant all by himself?), but this is actually half the point. Even our self-indulgences tend to be dominated by the logic of the gift. Similarly, some might object that shelling out a small fortune to send one’s children to an exclusive kindergarten is more about stares than altruism. Perhaps: but if you look at what happens over the course of people’s actual lives, it soon becomes apparent that this kind of behavior fulfills an identical psychological need. How many youthful idealists throughout history have managed to finally come to terms with a world based on selfishness and greed the moment they start a family? If one were to assume altruism were the primary human motivation, this would make perfect sense: The only way they can convince themselves to abandon their desire to do right by the world as a whole is to substitute an even more powerful desire to do right by their children.

What all this suggests to me is that American society might well work completely differently than we tend to assume. Imagine, for a moment, that the United States as it exists today were the creation of some ingenious social engineer. What assumptions about human nature could we say this engineer must have been working with? Certainly nothing like rational choice theory. For clearly our social engineer understands that the only way to convince human beings to enter into the world of work and the marketplace (that is, of mind-numbing labor and cutthroat competition) is to dangle the prospect of thereby being able to lavish money on one’s children, buy drinks for one’s friends, and, if one hits the jackpot, spend the rest of one’s life endowing museums and providing AIDS medications to impoverished countries in Africa. Our theorists are constantly trying to strip away the veil of appearances and show how all such apparently selfless gestures really mask mine kind of self-interested strategy, but in reality American society is better conceived as a battle over access to the right to behave altruistically. Selflessness–or, at least, the right to engage in high-minded activity–is not the strategy. It is the prize.

if nothing else, I think this helps us understand why the right has been so much better, in recent years, at playing to populist sentiments than the left. Essentially, they do it by accusing liberals of cutting ordinary Americans off from the right to do good in the world. Let me explain what I mean here by throwing out a series of propositions.

PROPOSITION I: NEITHER EGOISM NOR ALTRUISM IS A NATURAL URGE; THEY IN FACT ARISE IN RELATION TO EACH OTHER AND NEITHER WOULD BE CONCEIVABLE WITHOUT THE MARKET

First of all, I should make clear that I do not believe that either egoism or altruism is somehow inherent in human nature. Human motives are rarely that simple. Rather, egoism and altruism are ideas we have about human nature. Historically, one has tended to arise in response to the other. In the ancient world, for example, it is generally in the rimes and places that one sees the emergence of money and markets that one also sees the rise of world religions–Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. If one sets aside a space and says, “Here you shall think only about acquiring material things for yourself,” then it is hardly surprising that before long someone else will set aside a countervailing space and declare, in effect: “Yes, but here we must contemplate the fact that the self, and material things, are ultimately unimportant.” It was these latter institutions, of course, that first developed our modern notions of charity.

Even today, when we operate outside the domain of the market or of religion, very few of our actions could be said to be motivated by anything so simple as untrammeled greed or utterly selfless generosity. When we are dealing not with strangers but with friends, relatives, or enemies, a much more complicated set of motivations will generally come into play: envy, solidarity, pride, self-destructive grief, loyalty, romantic obsession, resentment, spite, shame, conviviality, the anticipation of shared enjoyment, the desire to show up a rival, and so on, These are the motivations impelling the major dramas of our lives that great novelists like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky immortalize but that social theorists, for some reason, tend to ignore, if one travels to parts of the world where money and markets do not exist–say, to certain parts of New Guinea or Amazonia–such complicated webs of motivation are precisely what one still finds. In societies based around small communities, where almost everyone is either a friend, a relative, or an enemy of everyone else, the languages spoken tend even to lack words that correspond to “self-interest” or “altruism” but include very subtle vocabularies for describing envy, solidarity, pride, and the like. Their economic dealings with one another likewise tend to he based on much more subtle principles. Anthropologists have created a vast literature to try to fathom the dynamics of these apparently exotic “gift economies,” but if it seems odd to us to see, for instance, important men conniving with their cousins to finagle vast wealth, which they then present as gifts to bitter enemies in order to publicly humiliate them, it is because we are so used to operating inside impersonal markets that it never occurs to us to think how we would act if we had an economic system in which we treated people based on how we actually felt about them.

Nowadays, the work of destroying such ways of life is still often done by missionaries–representatives of those very world religions that originally sprang up in reaction to the market long ago. Missionaries, of course, are out to save souls; but they rarely interpret this to mean their role is simply to teach people to accept God and be more altruistic. Almost invariably, they end up trying to convince people to be more selfish and more altruistic at the same time. On the one hand, they set out to teach the “natives” proper work discipline, and try to get them involved with buying and rolling products on the market, so as to better their material lot. At the same time, they explain to them that ultimately, material things are unimportant, and lecture on the value of the higher things, such as selfless devotion to others.

PROPOSITION II: THE POLITICAL RIGHT HAS ALWAYS TRIED TO ENHANCE THIS DIVISION AND THUS CLAIMS TO BE THE CHAMPION OF BOTH EGOISM AND ALTRUISM SIMULTANEOUSLY. THE LEFT HAS TRIED TO EFFACE IT

Might this not help to explain why the United States, the most market-driven, industrialized society on earth, is also among the most religious? Or, even more strikingly, why the country that produced Tolstoy and Dostoevsky spent much of the twentieth century trying to eradicate both the market and religion entirely?

Whereas the political left has always tried to efface this distinction–whether by trying to create economic systems that are nor driven by the profit motive or by replacing private charity with one or another form of community support–the political right has always thrived on it. In the United States, for example, the Republican Party is dominated by two ideological wings: the libertarians and the “Christian right.” At one extreme, Republicans are free-market fundamentalists and advocates of individual liberties (even if they see those liberties largely as a matter of consumer choice); on the other, they are fundamentalists of a more literal variety, suspicious of most individual liberties but enthusiastic about biblical injunctions, “family values,” and charitable good works. At first glance it might seem remarkable that such an alliance manages to hold together at all (and certainly they have ongoing tensions, most famously over abortion). But, in fact, right-wing coalitions almost always take some variation of this form. One might say that the right’s approach is to release the dogs of the market, throwing all traditional verities into disarray; and then, in this tumult of insecurity, offer themselves tip as the last bastion of order and hierarchy, the stalwart defenders of the authority of churches and fathers against the barbarians they have themselves unleashed. A scam it may be, but it is a remarkably effective one; and one result is that the right ends up seeming to have a monopoly on value. It manages, we might say, to occupy both positions, on either side of the divide: extreme egoism and extreme altruism.

Consider, for a moment, the word “value.” When economists talk about value they are really talking about money–or, more precisely, about whatever it is that money is measuring; also, whatever it is that economic actors are assumed to be pursuing. When we are working for a living, or buying and selling things, we are rewarded with money. But whenever we are not working or buying or selling, when we are motivated by pretty much anything other than the desire to get money, we suddenly find ourselves in the domain of “values.” The most commonly invoked of these are, of course, “family values” (which is unsurprising, since by far the most common form of unpaid labor in most industrial societies is child-rearing and housework), but we also talk about religious values, political values, the values that attach themselves to art or patriotism–one could even, perhaps, count loyalty to one’s favorite basketball team. All are seen as commitments that are, or ought to be, uncorrupted by the market. At the same time, they are also seen as utterly unique; whereas money makes all things comparable, “values” such as beauty, devotion, or integrity cannot, by definition, be compared. There is no mathematical formula that could possibly allow one to calculate just how much personal integrity it is right to sacrifice in the pursuit of art or how to balance responsibilities to your family with responsibilities to your God. (Obviously, people do make these kinds of compromises all the time. But they cannot be calculated.) One might put it this way: if value is simply what one considers important, then money allows importance to take a liquid form, by enabling us to compare precise quantities of importance and trade one off for the other. If someone does accumulate a very large amount of money, the first thing he or she is likely to do is to try to convert it into something unique, whether it be Monet’s water lilies, a prizewinning racehorse, or an endowed chair at a university.

What is really at stake here in any market economy is precisely the ability to make these trades, to convert “value” into “values.” All of us are striving to put ourselves in a position in which we can dedicate ourselves to something larger than ourselves. When liberals do well in America, it’s because they can embody that possibility: the Kennedys, for example, are the ultimate Democratic icons not just because they started as poor Irish immigrants who made enormous amounts of money but because they are seen as having managed, ultimately, to turn all that money into nobility.

PROPOSITION III: THE REAL PROBLEM OF THE AMERICAN LEFT IS THAT ALTHOUGH IT DOES TRY IN CERTAIN WAYS TO EFFACE THE DIVISION BETWEEN EGOISM AND ALTRUISM, VALUE AND VALUES, IT LARGELY DOES SO FOR ITS OWN CHILDREN. THIS HAS ALLOWED THE RIGHT, PARADOXICALLY, TO REPRESENT ITSELF AS THE CHAMPION OF THE WORKING CLASS

This proposition might help explain why the left in America is in such a mess. Far from promoting new visions of effacing the difference between egoism and altruism, value and values, or providing a model for passing from one to the other, progressives cannot even seem to understand the problem. After the last presidential election, the big debate in progressive circles was the relative importance of economic issues versus what was called “the culture wars.” Did the Democrats lose because they were not able to spell out any plausible economic alternatives, or did the Republicans win because they successfully mobilized evangelical Christians around the issue of gay marriage? The very fact that progressives frame the question this way not only shows they are trapped in the right’s terms of analysis; it demonstrates that they do not understand how America really works.

Let me illustrate what i mean by considering the strange popular appeal, at least until recently, of George W. Bush. In 2004 most of the American liberal intelligentsia did not seem to be able to get their minds around it. After the election, what left so many of them reeling was their suspicion that the things they most hated about Bush were exactly what so many Bush voters liked about him. Consider the debates, for example. If statistics are to be believed, millions of Americans watched George Bush and John Kerry lock horns, concluded that Kerry won, and then went off and voted for Bush anyway. It was hard to escape the suspicion that, in the end, Kerry’s articulate presentation, his skill with words and arguments, had actually counted against him.

This sent liberals into spirals of despair. They could not understand why decisive leadership was equated with acting like an idiot. Neither could they understand how a man who comes from one of the most elite families in the country, who attended Andover, Yale, and Harvard, and whose signature facial expression is a self-satisfied smirk, ever convinced anyone he was a “man of the people.” I must admit I have struggled with this as well. As a child of working-class parents who won a scholarship to Andover in the 1970s and, eventually, a job at Yale, I have spent much of my life in the presence of men like Bush, every inch of them oozing self-satisfied privilege. But, in fact, stories like mine–stories of dramatic class mobility through academic accomplishment–are increasingly unusual in America.

America, of course, continues to see itself as a land of opportunity, and certainly from the perspective of an immigrant from Haiti or Bangladesh it is. But America has always been a country built on the promise of unlimited upward mobility. The working-class condition has been traditionally seen as a way station, as something one’s family passes through on the road to something else. Abraham Lincoln used to stress that what made American democracy possible was the absence of a class of permanent wage laborers. In Lincoln’s day, the ideal was that wage laborers would eventually save up enough money to build a better life: if nothing else, to buy some land and become a homesteader on the frontier.

The point is not how accurate this ideal was; the point is that most Americans have found the image plausible. Every time the road is perceived to be clogged, profound unrest ensues. The closing of the frontier led to bitter labor struggles, and over the course of the twentieth century, the steady and rapid expansion of the American university system could be seen as a kind of substitute. Particularly after World War II, huge resources were poured into expanding the higher education system, which grew extremely rapidly, and all this growth was promoted quite explicitly as a means of social mobility. This served during the Cold War as almost an implied social contract, not just offering a comfortable life to the working classes but holding out the chance that their children would not be working class themselves. The problem, of course, is that a higher education system cannot be expanded forever. At a certain point one ends up with a significant portion of the population unable to find work even remotely in line with their qualifications, who have every reason to be angry about their situation, and who also have access to the entire history of radical thought. By the late Sixties and early Seventies, the very point when the expansion of the university system hit a dead end, campuses were, predictably, exploding.

What followed could be seen as a kind of settlement. Campus radicals were reabsorbed into the university but set to work largely at training children of the elite. As the cost of education has skyrocketed, financial aid has been cut back, and the prospect of social mobility through education–above all liberal arts education–has been rapidly diminished. The number of working-class students in major universities, which steadily grew until the Seventies, has now been declining for decades. The matter was further complicated by the fact that this overall decline of accessibility happened at almost exactly the same time that many who had previously been excluded (the G.I. Bill of Rights, after all, had applied basically to white males) were finally being welcomed. These were the identities celebrated in the campus “identity politics” of the Eighties and Nineties–an inclusiveness that notably did not extend to, say, Baptists or “rednecks.” Unsurprisingly, many focused their rage not on govern. merit or on university administrations but on minorities, queers, and feminists.

Why do working-class Bush voters tend to resent intellectuals more than they do the rich? It seems to me that the answer is simple. They can imagine a scenario in which they might become rich but cannot possibly imagine one in which they, or any of their children, would become members of the intelligentsia. If you think about it, this is not an unreasonable assessment. A mechanic from Nebraska knows it is highly unlikely that his son or daughter will ever become an Enron executive. But it is possible. There is virtually no chance, however, that his child, no matter how talented, will ever become an international human-rights lawyer or a drama critic for the New York Times. Here we need to remember not just the changes in higher education but also the role of unpaid, or effectively unpaid, internships. It has become a fact of life in the United States that if one chooses a career for any reason other than the salary, for the first year or two one will not be paid. This is certainly true if one wishes to be involved in altruistic pursuits: say, to join the world of charities, or NGOs, or to become a political activist. But it is equally true if one wants to pursue values like Beauty or Truth: to become part of the world of books, or the art world, or an investigative reporter. The custom effectively seals off such a career for any poor student who actually does attain a liberal arts education. Such structures of exclusion had always existed, of course, especially at the top, but in recent decades fences have become fortresses.

If that mechanic’s daughter wishes to pursue something higher, more noble, for a career, what options does she really have? Likely just two: She can seek employment at her local church, which is hard to get. Or she can join the army.

This is, of course, the secret of nobility. To be noble is to be generous, high-minded, altruistic, to pursue higher forms of value. But it is also to be able to do so because one does not really have to think too much about money. This is precisely what our soldiers are doing when they give free dental examinations to villagers: they are being paid (modestly, but adequately) to do good in the world. Seen in this light, it is also easier to see what really happened at universities in the wake of the 1960s–the “settlement” I mentioned above. Campus radicals set out to create a new society that destroyed the distinction between egoism and altruism, value and values. It did not work out, but they were, effectively, offered a kind of compensation: the privilege to use the university system to create lives that did so, in their own little way, to be supported in one’s material needs while pursuing virtue, truth, and beauty, and, above all, to pass that privilege on to their own children. One cannot blame them for accepting the offer. But neither can one blame the rest of the country for hating them for it. Not because they reject the project: as I say, this is what America is all about. As I always tell activists engaged in the peace movement and counter-recruitment campaigns: why do working-class kids join the army anyway? Because, like any teenager, they want to escape the world of tedious work and meaningless consumerism, to live a life of adventure and camaraderie in which they believe they are doing something genuinely noble. They join the army because they want to be like you.

~~~~~~~~

By David Graeber

David Graeber is an anthropologist and activist currently living in New York City. An associate professor at Yale, he is the author of Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value and Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

pittsburgh gal Says:January 14th, 2007 at 10:39 pm

this article is awesome, so insightful! we should have a department of peace that pays to send kids from all backgrounds overseas to do good stuff- like peacecorps or americorps, but actually fund it like the military is.

sirila Says:January 18th, 2007 at 4:16 pm

Thank you Mr Graeber and whatever good-citizen typed this all out. I agree it is a tour de force. It’s not often I read something *new*, but this is very thought-provoking. I appreciate the opportunity to email it to friends.

a-train Says:January 19th, 2007 at 9:58 am

I agree completely with Sirila re: your article. I’d add that the implications for political and social action (particularly on the left) are profound and far-reaching.

Additionally, I’m in law school right now and I have seen your thesis play out over and over again (though I was not careful enough of an observer to note the phenomena until I read your article). The legal jobs in the “altruistic” practice areas (civil liberties, legal aid, etc) are among the most competitive, and in most cases only the most privileged can afford to do what it takes to land those jobs (unpaid internships, travel, etc.).

http://www.sleepykid.org/blog/2007/01/13/army-of-altruists/

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A National Intelligence Estimate on the United States{1}

by Chalmers Johnson {2}

Harper's Magazine (January 2007)

KEY JUDGMENTS

The United States remains, for the moment, the mostpowerful nation in history, but it faces a violentcontradiction between its long republican tradition andits more recent imperial ambitions.

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests thatsuch a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolvedin one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empireand lost its democracy. Britain chose to remaindemocratic and in the process let go its empire.Intentionally or not, the people of the United Statesalready are well embarked upon the course ofnon-democratic empire.

Several factors, however, indicate that this coursewill be a brief one, which most likely will end ineconomic and political collapse.

Military Keynesianism: The imperial project isexpensive. The flow of the nation's wealth fromtaxpayers and (increasingly) foreign lenders throughthe government to military contractors and(decreasingly) back to the taxpayers - has created aform of "military Keynesianism", in which the domesticeconomy requires sustained military ambition in orderto avoid recession or collapse.

The Unitary Presidency: Sustained military ambition isinherently anti-republican, in that it tends toconcentrate power in the executive branch. In the UnitedStates, President George W Bush subscribes to anesoteric interpretation of the Constitution called thetheory of the unitary executive, which holds, in effect,that the president has the authority to ignore theseparation of powers written into the Constitution,creating a feedback loop

in which permanent war and the unitary presidency aremutually reinforcing.

Failed Checks on Executive Ambition: The USlegislature and judiciary appear to be incapable ofrestraining the president and therefore restrainingimperial ambition. Direct opposition from the people,in the form of democratic action or violent uprising, isunlikely because the television and print media haveby and large found it unprofitable to inform the publicabout the actions of the country's leaders. Nor is itlikely that the military will attempt to take over theexecutive branch by way of a coup.

Bankruptcy and Collapse: Confronted by the limits ofits own vast but nonetheless finite financial resourcesand lacking the political check on spending provided bya functioning democracy, the United States will withina very short time face financial or even politicalcollapse at home and a significantly diminished abilityto project force abroad.

DISCUSSION

Military Keynesianism

The ongoing US militarization of its foreign affairshas spiked precipitously in recent years, withincreasingly expensive commitments in Afghanistan andIraq. These commitments grew from many specificpolitical factors, including the ideologicalpredilections of the current regime, the growing needfor material access to the oil rich regions of theMiddle East, and a long-term bipartisan emphasis onhegemony as a basis for national security. Thedomestic economic basis for these commitments, however,is consistently overlooked. Indeed, America's hegemonicpolicy is in many ways most accurately understood asthe inevitable result of its decades-long policy ofmilitary Keynesianism.

During the Depression that preceded World War II, theEnglish economist John Maynard Keynes, a liberalcapitalist, proposed a form of governance that wouldmitigate the boom-and bust cycles inherent incapitalist economies. To prevent the economy fromcontracting, a development typically accompanied bysocial unrest, Keynes thought the government shouldtake on debt in order to put people back to work. Someof these deficit-financed government jobs might besocially useful, but Keynes was not averse to creatingmake-work tasks if necessary. During periods ofprosperity, the government would cut spending andrebuild the treasury. Such countercyclical planning wascalled "pump-priming". Upon taking office in 1933, USPresident Franklin Roosevelt, with the assistance ofCongress, put several Keynesian measures into effect,including socialized retirement plans, minimum wagesfor all workers, and government-financed jobs onmassive projects, including the Triborough Bridge inNew York City, the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington, andthe Tennessee Valley Authority, a flood-control andelectric-power generation complex covering sevenstates. Conservative capitalists feared that thisdegree of government intervention would delegitimatecapitalism - which they understood as an economicsystem of quasi-natural laws - and shift the balance ofpower from the capitalist class to the working class andits unions. For these reasons, establishment figurestried to hold back countercyclical spending.

The onset of World War II, however, made possible asignificantly modified form of state socialism. Theexiled Polish economist Michal Kalecki attributedGermany's success in overcoming the global Depressionto a phenomenon that has come to be known as "militaryKeynesianism". Government spending on arms increasedmanufacturing and also had a multiplier effect ongeneral consumer spending by raising worker incomes.Both of these points are in accordance with generalKeynesian doctrine. In addition, the enlargement ofstanding armies absorbed many workers, often youngmales with few skills and less education.

The military thus becomes an employer of last resort,like Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps, but on amuch larger scale.

Rather than make bridges and dams, however, workerswould make bullets, tanks, and fighter planes. This madeall the difference. Although Adolf Hitler did notundertake rearmament for purely economic reasons, thefact that he advocated governmental support for armsproduction made him acceptable not only to the Germanindustrialists, who might otherwise have opposed hisdestabilizing expansionist policies, but also to manyaround the world who celebrated his achievement of a"German economic miracle".

In the United States, Keynesian policies continued tobenefit workers, but, as in Germany, they alsoincreasingly benefited wealthy manufacturers and othercapitalists. By the end of the war, the United Stateshad seen a massive shift. Dwight Eisenhower, who helpedwin that war and later became president, described thisshift in his 1961 presidential farewell address:

Our military organization today bears little relationto that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, orindeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the UnitedStates had no armaments industry. American makers ofplowshares could, with time and as required, make swordsas well. But we can no longer risk emergencyimprovisation of national defense; we have beencompelled to create a permanent armaments industry ofvast proportions. Added to this, three and a halfmillion men and women are directly engaged in thedefense establishment. We annually spend on militarysecurity alone more than the net income of all UnitedStates corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishmentand a large arms industry is new in the Americanexperience. The total influence - economic, political,and even spiritual - is felt in every city, everystatehouse, every office of the federal government. Werecognize the imperative need for this development. Yetwe must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; sois the very structure of our society.

Eisenhower went on to suggest that such anarrangement, which he called the "military industrialcomplex", could be perilous to American ideals. Theshort-term economic benefits were clear, but the verynature of those benefits - which were all too carefullydistributed among workers and owners in "every city,every statehouse, every office of the federalgovernment" - tended to short-circuit Keynes'sinsistence that government spending be cut back in goodtimes. The prosperity of the United States cameincreasingly to depend upon the construction andcontinual maintenance of a vast war machine, and somilitary supremacy and economic security becameincreasingly intertwined in the minds of voters. No onewanted to turn off the pump.

Between 1940 and 1996, for instance, the United Statesspent nearly $4.5 trillion on the development, testing,and construction of nuclear weapons alone. By 1967, thepeak year of its nuclear stockpile, the United Statespossessed some 32,000 deliverable bombs. None of themwas ever used, which illustrates perfectly Keynes'sobservation that, in order to create jobs, thegovernment might as well decide to bury money in oldmines and "leave them to private enterprise on thewell-tried principles of laissez faire to dig them upagain". Nuclear bombs were not just America's secretweapon; they were also a secret economic weapon.

Such spending helped create economic growth thatlasted until the 1973 oil crisis. In the 1980s,President Ronald Reagan once again brought the tools ofmilitary Keynesianism to bear, with a policy ofsignificant tax cuts and massive deficit spending onmilitary projects, allegedly to combat a new threatfrom Communism. Reagan's military expendituresaccounted for 5.9 percent of the gross domestic productin 1984, which in turn fueled a seven percent growthrate for the economy as a whole and helped reelectReagan by a landslide.

During the Clinton years military spending fell toabout three percent of GDP, but the economy ralliedstrongly in Clinton's second term due to the boom ininformation technologies, weakness in the previouslycompetitive Japanese economy, and - paradoxically -serious efforts to reduce the national debt. {3} Withthe coming to power of George W Bush, however,military Keynesianism returned once again. Indeed,after he began his war with Iraq, the once-erraticrelationship between defense spending and economicgrowth became nearly parallel. A spike in defensespending in one quarter would see a spike in GDP, anda drop in defense spending would likewise see a drop inGDP.

To understand the real weight of military Keynesianismin the American economy today, however, one mustapproach official defense statistics with great care.The "defense" budget of the United States - that is,the reported budget of the Department of Defense - doesnot include: the Department of Energy's spending onnuclear weapons ($16.4 billion slated for fiscal2006), the Department of Homeland Security's outlaysfor the actual "defense" of the United States ($41billion), or the Department of Veterans Affairs'responsibilities for the lifetime care of the seriouslywounded ($68 billion). Nor does it include the billionsof dollars the Department of State spends each year tofinance foreign arms sales and militarily relateddevelopment or the Treasury Department's payment ofpensions to military retirees and widows and theirfamilies (an amount not fully disclosed by officialstatistics). Still to be added are interest payments bythe Treasury to cover past debt-financed defenseoutlays. The economist Robert Higgs estimates that in2002 such interest payments amounted to $138.7 billion.

Even when all these things are included, Enron-styleaccounting makes it hard to obtain an accurateunderstanding of US dependency on military spending.In 2005, the Government Accounting Office reported toCongress that "neither DOD nor Congress can reliablyknow how much the war is costing" or "details on howthe appropriated funds are being spent". Indeed, theGAO found that, lacking a reliable method of trackingmilitary costs, the Army had taken to simply insertinginto its accounts figures that matched the availablebudget. Such actions seem absurd in terms of militarylogic. But they are perfectly logical responses to therequirements of military Keynesianism, which placesits emphasis not on the demand for defense but ratheron the available supply of money.

The Unitary Presidency

Military Keynesianism may be economic development byother means, but it does very often lead to real war,or, if not real war, then a significantly warlikepolitical environment. This creates a feedback loop:American presidents know that military Keynesianismtends to concentrate power in the executive branch, andso presidents who seek greater power have a naturalinducement to encourage further growth of themilitary-industrial complex. As the phenomena feed oneach other, the usual outcome is a real war, based noton the needs of national defense but rather on thedomestic political logic of military Keynesianism.

As US Senator Robert La Follett Sr observed, "In timesof peace, the war party insists on making preparationfor war. As soon as prepared for war, it insists onmaking war." George W Bush has taken this naturalpolitical phenomenon to an extreme never beforeexperienced by the American electorate. Everypresident has sought greater authority, but Bush - whosefather lost his position as forty-first president in afair and open election - appears to believe thatincreasing presidential authority is both a birthrightand a central component of his historical legacy. He issupported in this belief by his vice president and chiefadviser, Dick Cheney.

In pursuit of more power, Bush and Cheney haveunilaterally authorized preventive war against nationsthey designate as needing "regime change", directedAmerican soldiers to torture persons they have seizedand imprisoned in various countries, ordered theNational Security Agency to carry out illegal "datamining" surveillance of the American people, and doneeverything they could to prevent Congress fromoutlawing "cruel, inhumane, or degrading" treatment ofpeople detained by the United States. Each of theseactions has been undertaken for specific ideological,tactical, or practical reasons, but also as part of ageneral campaign of power concentration.

Cheney complained in 2002 that, since he had served asGerald Ford's chief of staff, he had seen a significanterosion in executive power as post-Watergate presidentswere forced to "cough up and compromise on importantprinciples".

He was referring to such reforms as the War Powers Actof 1973, which requires that the president obtaincongressional approval within ninety days of orderingtroops into combat; the Budget and Impoundment ControlAct of 1974, which was designed to stop Nixon fromimpounding funds for programs he did not like; theFreedom of Information Act of 1966, which Congressstrengthened in 1974; President Ford's Executive Order11905 of 1976, which outlawed political assassination;and the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, which gavemore power to the House and Senate select committees onintelligence. Cheney said that these reforms were"unwise" because they "weaken the presidency and thevice presidency", and added that he and the presidentfelt an obligation "to pass on our offices in bettershape than we found them".

No president, however, has ever acknowledged thelegitimacy of the War Powers Act, and most of theseso-called limitations on presidential power had beengutted, ignored, or violated long before Cheney becamevice president. Republican Senator John Sununu of NewHampshire said, "The vice president may be the onlyperson I know of that believes the executive hassomehow lost power over the last thirty years". Bush andCheney have made it a primary goal of their terms inoffice, nonetheless, to carve executive power into thelaw, and the war has been the primary vehicle for suchactions. John Yoo, Bush's deputy assistant attorneygeneral from 2001 to 2003, writes in his book War ByOther Means (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), "We areused to a peacetime system in which Congress enactslaws, the President enforces them, and the courtsinterpret them. In wartime, the gravity shifts to theexecutive branch." Bush has claimed that he is "thecommander" and "the decider" and that therefore he doesnot "owe anybody an explanation" for anything. {4}Similarly, in a September 2006 press conference, WhiteHouse spokesman Tony Snow engaged in this dialogue:

A: No, as a matter of fact the president has anobligation to preserve, protect, and defend theConstitution of the United States. That is anobligation that presidents have enacted through signingstatements going back to Jefferson. So, while theSupreme Court can be an arbiter of the Constitution,the fact is the president is the one, the only personwho, by the Constitution, is given the responsibilityto preserve, protect, and defend that document, so itis perfectly consistent with presidential authorityunder the Constitution itself.

Snow was referring to the president's habit of signingbills into law accompanied by "statements" that,according to the American Bar Association, "assertPresident Bush's authority to disregard or decline toenforce laws adopted by Congress". All forty-twoprevious US presidents combined have signed statementsexempting themselves from the provisions of 568 newlaws, whereas Bush has, to date, exempted himself frommore than 1,000.

Failed Checks on Executive Ambition

The current administration's perspective on politicalpower is far from unique. Few, if any, presidents haverefused the increased executive authority that is thenatural byproduct of military Keynesianism. Moreover,the division of power between the president, theCongress, and the judiciary - often described as thebedrock of American democracy - has erodedsignificantly in recent years. The people, the press,and the military, too, seem anxious to cede power to a"wartime" president, leaving Bush, or those who followhim, almost entirely unobstructed in pursuing theimperial project.

Congress: Corrupt and indifferent, Congress, which theFounders believed would be the leading branch ofgovernment, has already entirely forfeited the power todeclare war. More recently, it gave the president thelegal right to detain anyone, even American citizens,without warrant, and to detain non-citizens withoutrecourse to habeas corpus, as well as to use a varietyof interrogation methods that he could define, at hissole discretion, to be or not be torture.

The Courts: The judicial branch is hardly moreeffective in restraining presidential ambition. TheSupreme Court was active in the installation of thecurrent president, and the lower courts increasinglyare packed with judges who believe they should defer tohis wishes. In 2006, for instance, US District JudgeDavid Trager dismissed a suit by athirty-five-year-old Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, whoin 2002 was seized by US government agents at John FKennedy Airport and delivered to Syria, where he wastortured for ten months before being released. Nocharges were filed against Arar, and his torturerseventually admitted he had no links to any crime. Inexplaining his dismissal, Trager noted with approval anearlier Supreme Court finding that such judgment would"threaten 'our customary policy of deference to thePresident in matters of foreign affairs'".

The Military: It is possible that the US militarycould take over the government and declare adictatorship. {5} That is how the Roman republicended. For the military voluntarily to move towarddirect rule, however, its leaders would have to ignoretheir ties to civilian society, where the symbolicimportance of constitutional legitimacy remains potent.Rebellious officers may well worry about how theAmerican people would react to such a move. Moreover,prosecutions of low-level military torturers from AbuGhraib prison and killers of civilians in Iraq havedemonstrated to enlisted ranks that obedience toillegal orders can result in their being punished,whereas officers go free. No one knows whether ordinaryAmerican soldiers would obey clearly illegal orders tooust an elected government or whether the officer corpshas sufficient confidence to issue such orders. Inaddition, the present system already offers themilitary high command so much - in funds, prestige, andfuture employment via the military-industrial revolvingdoor - that a perilous transition to anythingresembling direct military rule would make little senseunder reasonably normal conditions.

The People: Could the people themselves restoreconstitutional government? A grassroots movement tobreak the hold of the military industrial complex andestablish public financing of elections isconceivable. But, given the conglomerate control of themass media and the difficulties of mobilizing the UnitedStates' large and diffuse population, it is unlikely.Moreover, the people themselves have enjoyed theKeynesian benefits of the US imperial project and - inall but a few cases - have not yet suffered any of itsconsequences. {6}

Bankruptcy and Collapse

The more likely check on presidential power, and on USmilitary ambition, will be the economic failure thatis the inevitable consequence of military Keynesianism.Traditional Keynesianism is a stable two-part systemcomposed of deficit spending in bad times and debtpayment in good times. Military Keynesianism is anunstable one-part system. With no political check,debt accrues until it reaches a crisis point.

In the fiscal 2006 budget, the Congressional ResearchService estimates that Pentagon spending on OperationEnduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom will beabout $10 billion per month or an extra $120.3 billionfor the year.

As of mid-2006, the overall cost of the wars in Iraqand Afghanistan since their inception stood at morethan $400 billion. Joseph Stiglitz, the NobelPrize-winning economist, and his colleague, LindaBilmes, have tried to put together an estimate of thereal costs of the Iraq war. They calculate that itwill cost about $2 trillion by 2015. The conservativeAmerican Enterprise Institute suggests a figure at theopposite end of the spectrum - $1 trillion. Both figuresare an order of magnitude larger than what the BushAdministration publicly acknowledges.

At the same time, the US trade deficit, the largestcomponent of the current account deficit, soared to anall-time high in 2005 of $782.7 billion, the fourthconsecutive year that America's trade debts setrecords. The trade deficit with China alone rose to$201.5 billion, the highest imbalance ever recordedwith any country. Meanwhile, since mid-2000, thecountry has lost nearly three million manufacturingjobs. To try to cope with these imbalances, on March 162006, Congress raised the national debt limit from$8.2 trillion to $9 trillion. This was the fourth timesince George W Bush took office that the limit had to beraised. Had Congress not raised it, the US governmentwould not have been able to borrow more money and wouldhave had to default on its massive debts.

Among the creditors that finance this unprecedentedsum, two of the largest are the central banks of China($854 billion in reserves of dollars and other foreigncurrencies) and Japan ($850 billion), both of whichare the managers

of the huge trade surpluses these countries enjoy withthe United States. This helps explain why the UnitedStates' debt burden has not yet triggered whatstandard economic theory would predict, which is asteep decline in the value of the US dollar followed bya severe contraction of the American economy - theChinese and Japanese governments continue to bewilling to be paid in dollars in order to sustainAmerican demand for their exports. For the sake ofdomestic employment, both countries lend huge amountsto the American treasury, but there is no guarantee howlong they will want or be able to do so.

CONFIDENCE IN KEY JUDGMENTS

It is difficult to predict the course of a democracy,and perhaps even more so when that democracy is ascorrupt as that of the United States. With a newopposition party in the majority in the House, thecountry could begin a difficult withdrawal frommilitary Keynesianism. Like the British after World WarII, the United States could choose to keep itsdemocracy by giving up its empire. The British did notdo a particularly brilliant job of liquidating theirempire, and there were several clear cases in whichBritish imperialists defied their nation's commitment todemocracy in order to keep their foreign privileges -Kenya in the 1950s is a particularly savage example -but the people of the British Isles did choose democracyover imperialism, and that nation continues to thrive asa nation, if not as an empire.

It appears for the moment, however, that the people ofthe United States prefer the Roman approach and so willabet their government in maintaining a facade ofconstitutional democracy until the nation drifts intobankruptcy.

Of course, bankruptcy will not mean the literal end ofthe United States any more than it did for Germany in1923, China in 1948, or Argentina in 2001. It might,in fact, open the way for an unexpected restoration ofthe American system, or for military rule, revolution,or simply some new development we cannot yet imagine.Certainly, such a bankruptcy would mean a drasticlowering of the current American standard of living, aloss of control over international affairs, a process ofadjusting to the rise of other powers, including China

and India, and a further discrediting of the notionthat the United States is somehow exceptional comparedwith other nations. The American people will be forcedto learn what it means to be a far poorer nation andthe attitudes and manners that go with it. {7}

NOTES

1 The CIA's website defines a National IntelligenceEstimate as "the most authoritative written judgmentconcerning a national security issue prepared by theDirector of Central Intelligence." These forecasts of"future developments" and "their implications for theUnited States" seldom are made public, but there areexceptions. One was the NIE of September 2002 ,"Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of MassDestruction", which became notorious because virtuallyevery word in it was false. Another, an April 2006 MEentitled "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications forthe United States", was partly declassified byPresident Bush because its main conclusion - that"activists identifying themselves as jihads" are"increasing in both number and geographic dispersion" -had already been leaked to the press.

2 The CIA is prohibited from writing an NIE on theUnited States, and so I have here attempted to do somyself, using the standard format for such estimates. Ihave some personal knowledge of NIEs because from 1967to 1973 I served as an outside consultant to the CIA'sOffice of National Estimates. I was one of about a dozenso-called experts invited to read draft NIEs in orderto provide quality control and prevent bureaucraticlogrolling.

3 Military Keynesianism, it turns out, is not the onlyway to boost an economy.

4 In a January 2006 debate, Yoo was asked if any lawcould stop the president, if he "deems that he's got totorture somebody", from, say, "crushing the testiclesof the person's child". Yoo's response: "I think itdepends on why

the president thinks he needs to do that".

5 Though they undoubtedly would find a moreuser-friendly name for it.

6 In 2003, when the Iraq war began, the citizens ofthe United States could at least claim that it was thework of an administration that had lost the popularvote. But in 2004, Bush won that vote by more thanthree million ballots, making his war ours.

7 National Intelligence Estimates seldom containstartling new data. To me they always read like magazinearticles or well-researched and footnoted graduateseminar papers. When my wife once asked me what was sosecret about them, I answered that perhaps it was thefact that this was the best we could do.

_____

Chalmers Johnson is the author of Blowback(Metropolitan, 2000), The Sorrows of Empire(Metropolitan, 2004), and, most recently, Nemesis: TheLast Days of the American Republic, which will bepublished in February by Metropolitan Books. His lastarticle for Harper's Magazine, "The War Business:Squeezing a Profit from the Wreckage in Iraq", appearedin the November 2003 issue.

In today's world, the goals of a committed anarchist should be to defend some state institutions from the attack against them, while trying at the same time to pry them open to more meaningful public participation— and ultimately, to dismantle them in a much more free society, if the appropriate circumstances can be achieved.Noam Chomsky